[Haskell-beginners] Functional programming principles at higher levels?

[austin seipp]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Christopher Howard
<christopher.howard at frigidcode.com> wrote:
> ...
> snip
> ...
> Once I finally gave up on "learnyouahaskell" and other ridiculous tutorials, I found the real functional programming textbooks,
> ...
>

Can I ask what books these are, and furthermore what makes them more
'real' than LYAH or RWH? I think both of them are quite good for just
putting people on their feet and getting them writing code (although
RWH can come off as a bit evangelical at times.) These kinds of works
certainly are not for everybody, but I'm interested in your definition
of 'real' vs 'ridiculous' more than anything, since I think it's very
'real' material for most programmers (I just find it funny because per
my own experience, I'd think most people would write off type-theory
textbooks as "ridiculous" and "not real", as opposed to material like
LYAH/RWH. We'll ignore them, though.)

I guess the real question isn't quite where the definitions of 'real'
differ, but what you're trying to gain from reading these works. If
you really *do* want to know about things like System F, or HM type
inference, or the various kinds of polymorphism found in programming
languages, then yes, LYAH and RWH are probably 'ridiculous' by those
standards - and there are great books on these subjects too, in
particular Benjamin Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages."

Going back to your initial question, I think the concepts are mostly
orthogonal, aren't they? It's hard to know what you're asking. I'm not
the biggest web-dev person in existence, but would it not be possible
to write a RESTful service in something like Haskell, where your code
you wrote is pure and cleanly isolated and all the other stuff we
love? You could say programs like XMonad follow the 'MVC' pattern in
its own way, as it cleanly separates its model - the internal Zipper
data structure - from its view - X11 rendering - from its controller -
configuration/input response. Is there some rigid pattern that must be
followed closer than this? Or are you thinking about such overall
designs that are more 'in tune' with FP and PL research itself? For
many questions of this nature, I don't know how much type theory or PL
semantics is going to come into the question - it exists in a
different strata, it seems.

I'm perfectly open to being proven wrong on this point though, since
it's more an observation as a result of your question.


P.S. Personally, I think it's wonderful we actually have a community
(and people like you!) who're interested in taking the time to learn
about these topics, for whatever reason. I actually think that much of
the subject matter in the field is very rich, yet approachable -
speaking from anecdotal evidence as someone who has no higher-math
education.

-- 
Regards,
Austin